Over the last week I’ve given my fourth year physiotherapy students 2 assignments to be completed over the next few months. Here is a basic rundown of each.

The first assignment is part of the continuous evaluation for the Management module I teach. The students must create a website for a (fictional) private physiotherapy practice. They’ll be using Google Sites as the platform, which seems to be the simplest approach that removes most of the barriers to creating sites for people with no experience in this regard. I wanted to make the technology as small a factor as possible, which I think Sites does quite nicely. The objectives for the students are that they should be better able to:

Identify relevant information that potential clients would need to find their practice

Identify and make use of professional guidelines on advertising and self-promotion

Learn new skills that will better prepare them for practice e.g. establishing an online presence using freely available tools

Be creative in how they present themselves and their practices

The second assignment is part of the Ethics and Human Rights in Health module that I teach. Students will use a wiki to explore the differences in community-based physiotherapy in South Africa (University of the Western Cape) and Ireland (Royal College of Surgeons), as part of an international collaborative project on Physiopedia. This assignment will focus on groupwork and collaborative learning, using the content as a framework on which to build a body of shared experiences. They will be working with Irish physiotherapy students to create short narratives on the different learning and practical experiences of stutdents working in both countries. The objectives (for our students) that they should be better able to:

Identify relevant sources of information to provide background to the narratives

Highlight the role of the physiotherapist in community-based healthcare settings

Explore and discuss some of the ethical and patient rights issues inherent in the South African healthcare system

Engage in dialogue with students who come from different backgrounds, cultures and socio-economic environments, acknowledging the perspectives of those who experience the world in different ways

Make effective use of technology to community with and share ideas with peers who are geographically dispersed

Participate in the peer review process, by commenting on the work of other groups

I’ll be reporting on the progress of the students as they work on these assignments, and will be making any findings available following their completion.

I came across Physiopedia when the site creator, Rachael Lowe, followed me on Twitter. Physiopedia is a free (to access, not edit) physiotherapy reference that has a great emphasis on being evidence based. You must be a registered physiotherapist to get an account that enables you to contribute, which is how the site maintains quality control. A quick overview of the articles reveals that this is indeed a high quality resource for physiotherapy clinicians, educators and students. Perhaps the best thing about each article is not only the concise information it presents, but the reference list it provides for each article, pointing the reader to original resources. It’s a very impressive effort.

You may wonder why I’m mentioning Physiopedia since my own site, OpenPhysio, is an attempt to be the same thing…a free physiotherapy resource for clinicians, educators and students. There are however, some differences that I think are worth pointing out, the main one of which is the issue of licensing. All the content published on OpenPhysio is specifically released under this Creative Commons license, which allows anyone to take that content and share, distribute and adapt the work, so long as they provide attribution to the original source, don’t make any money from it, and agree to share it under the same conditions. I think this is an important distinction that in itself, is enough to differentiate the two projects. Not that Physiopedia is using some heinous license, it’s just that it’s not specifically open. The other thing that stands out immediately is the clean aesthetic and writing style of Physiopedia.

I think that there’s a lot of work that needs to be done on OpenPhysio if it’s going to participate in a field with such high quality content, but that’s the whole point isn’t it? As long as there are people pushing this agenda, the future of free and open content is looking good. At the end of the day, the more information that’s available for physiotherapists and students, the stronger we’ll become as a profession.

Note (06/04/09): I just received an email from Rachael stating that Physiopedia used the GFDL, a great license for promoting open content.